


Nowhere to Go

by SegaBarrett



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:28:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27771517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Tara and Kiri have a case with a personal stake.
Relationships: Charismatic crime consultant & their smart assistant & competent detective
Kudos: 3
Collections: Heart Attack Exchange 2020





	Nowhere to Go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OfHeroesAndCrooks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfHeroesAndCrooks/gifts).



Kiri McClellan arrived in the town of Pinecrest in the back of an Uber, biting her fingers and staring out the window. She hoped that things would fall into place after she pulled the door open and stepped out into town, but she doubted it.

She had been confident, once – between she and her twin sister, she had been the Homecoming Queen to May’s quiet loner – but things had changed. 

There had been a lot of things that had changed quite a bit.

She hadn’t liked most of them.

Tara had changed, too, and maybe that was the real reason why Kiri was headed her way. 

The last she had seen of her older half-sister, she had been a journalist in Chicago, reporting on politics first, and then on crime. That had been five or six years ago, maybe even longer. 

Apparently there had been a career change in the last few years. 

She hadn’t seen Tara around at the twentieth anniversary vigil of their father’s death. The reporters had decided to only speak to May and Kiri, to focus on the children of his contentious second marriage rather than his forgotten first.

Maybe it had been for the best; maybe Tara hadn’t wanted the attention. 

Maybe she didn’t actually want Kiri stopping by now, despite the sudden invitation. But yet, here she was. 

Lucky, lucky Tara.

As the Uber pulled up near Tara’s street, Kiri let out a sigh before saying, “You can just drop me here.”

“It says the address is at the end of…”

“You can just drop me here.”

***

Kiri wasn’t sure if there had ever been a time that Tara had been happy to see her, but this seemed to be a new low.

“Hey,” Tara said grimly at the door, “Come in.”

Kiri stepped in and looked around: it was a small apartment, with a recliner, fake fireplace, a green couch and a TV.

“Nice place,” she said. “How long have you lived out here?”

“About a week,” Tara replied, “Ever since I found out about what happened.”

“You mean the murder,” Kiri blurted, trying not to sound as intrigued as she felt. After all, a man was dead.

And it had been a man who she had known. Well, at least she had known him a little bit. She had talked to him six years ago, but she couldn’t quite recall his face. Maybe that was for the best.

“Yeah, the murder,” Tara replied. “Are you going to help me out or not? You said you wanted to be my assistant, so you better plan to assist. I don’t plan on giving you any leeway, just because you’re my sister. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Have you ever had an assistant before?” Kiri asked. Her sister hesitated.

“Okay, so to be fair, no I have not. But I was an assistant. Back in Chicago. And it’s not glamorous. So I hope you know what you’re getting into.”

Kiri rolled her eyes.

“I’m not a little kid anymore, Tara. So please stop treating me like one.”

“Yeah, I understand,” Tara shot back, “But you have to understand that this is serious and we are going to take it completely seriously. This is not ‘Harriet the Spy’. We are going to figure out whoever killed Wendell Hart, and we are going to bring them to justice.”

“How do you even know that?” Kiri asked, collapsing into the recliner. “You’re talking like you already know who the guy is. And if you have that part figured out, well then, why am I here and what am I doing?”

“I don’t know who he is,” Tara said, “So shush. And yes, I brought you here as my assistant. So we’re going to get to work.”

Tara walked to the large bookcase that stood behind her – it was vast, but there was only one shelf that was actually full. The empty holes gave it an odd and ominous look to Kiri, one that she couldn’t quite pull her eyes away from even when Tara started talking again.

“They found Wendell’s body when they did one last sweep of the Pinecrest Mall before they could knock it down. It’s been closed down for five years now, but they want to raze it completely and put a new strip mall on top of it.”

“That’s… disturbing,” Kiri mused. “So did someone have to get into an abandoned mall in the first place to kill him? And why was he in an abandoned mall in the first place? It’s not like he ran in to get to a sale at the Boscov’s that was completely shuttered.”

“Maybe he was meeting with someone who didn’t want to be seen. That’s what I’m thinking,” Tara said, “And as you know, Wendell was working on a book about Dad.”

“Yeah, he talked to me back at the twentieth anniversary,” Kiri replied. “I don’t even remember what he was asking about. I mean, I don’t even know what he wanted from me. It’s not like I remember anything about back then. I was five.” She paused. “Did he talk to you, too?”

Tara nodded, beginning to root through the books on the shelf. 

“I know I brought it with me,” she said, “If I can only find it… Here it is.”

She pulled back a thin blue book and held it up in front of Kiri so she could see it.

“What am I looking at? There’s no cover.”

“This is the rough draft of Wendell’s book,” Tara explained, “He sent it to me two days before he died. Now, why would someone send a copy of a book that hasn’t been published yet to the daughter of the man he’s writing about?”

“Well, maybe he wanted to make sure you approved of it or something.”

“Then he would have sent it to Birdie.”

Birdie was Kiri’s mother and Tara’s stepmother, a curator at the Lewis and Clark Interpretative Center in North Dakota, with a "winter home" in South Philadelphia; she had explained it to Kiri once as a refuge from needing to plug in her car.

Kiri shrugged.

“Maybe she didn’t like him.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Tara replied. “Anyway, let’s look through this. I feel like there has to be a clue of at least who he would be meeting and who he might have riled up along the way. We have to narrow it down.”

“Don’t people do like hundreds of interviews for these kinds of things, though?” Kiri asked. “How do we narrow them down?”

Tara smiled at her.

“That’s your job.”

***

It was almost eleven at night when the phone rang, dropping Kiri out of the recliner and landing her on the floor.

“Hello?” She heard Tara’s voice say. “Oh good, thank you for getting back to me. No, it’s not too late.”

 _Maybe for you,_ Kiri thought, rubbing her head. She hadn’t seen a single thing that stood out in the book above everything else. No one that Wendell had spoken to seemed as if they could ever be a killer. That, and most of the names seemed familiar to her. They were her father’s old associates – his manager Murray Finch, his producer Marjorie Kemp, and all of his old bandmates back in Blue Neighbor. 

The only killer that their father had run into was still locked up in James River Correctional Center.

“Yeah, I hear what you’re saying,” she heard Tara say, “I haven’t found anything yet. My assistant is here and we’re looking over the book. If you want to come over and see what we’ve got, please come by, but right now it’s honestly a whole lot of nothing. I have a lot more questions than answers.” She paused. “Oh, and it was that guy who worked for the bank that broke into the vault and stole the jewels. Just like you suspected it was going to be. I found a letter written by him a few years ago that pretty much spelled it out.” There was a pause. “Yeah, I’ll be careful.” She hung up.

As if on cue, and just as Kiri was moving back into the recliner and wondering if she should be offended or proud to be referred to as her sister’s assistant and not as her, well, sister, a crash of thunder nearly knocked her over again.

“Where did that come from?” she wondered aloud.

“It’s been raining the past hour,” Tara said, “You must have fallen asleep and missed it. Any luck looking through the book?”

“No. I feel like I know all these names, but no one seems like they have any kind of a deep dark past. I mean, most of these people used to send me birthday presents. Murray still does.”

“Well, I think we can probably cross Murray off the suspect list,” Tara agreed, “Considering he’s still living in Spain. He didn’t really seem the type, either.”

Murray, according to the book as well as popular lore, had been in love with Tara and Kiri’s father, Paice McClellan. Whether anything had come of it was still unclear, as neither man had ever truly spoken on it. And Paice’s side of the story seemed to have died with him.

“But as for everyone else,” Tara continued, “We can’t really rule out anyone. There’s got to be someone who didn’t want their secrets out in the open.”

***

It was like a walk through her childhood. She could remember where she had been, she and May, when her mother had come home to tell her that a man had shot their father. She hadn’t understood it at the time, of course, and she hadn’t understood it for years later, either. 

But people had started coming by the house to pay their respects – lots of people – and they were all in the book.

The three other members of Blue Neighbor. They’d usually stopped by separately but once, on May and Kiri’s birthday, they had come as an awkward six-legged band, full of smiles that didn’t meet their eyes and apologies and excuses to leave as soon as they could.

Closer, but still a little distant, had been Murray, the quiet and refined manager. He had always shown up in what looked to be an expensive suit, drank tea and chatted with Kiri’s mother, gave a fancy gift to the twins, and then departed with a sad look over his shoulder. 

“He’s wondering about what could have been,” May said once, when they were about fifteen. Kiri didn’t ask what she meant, not at the time, but the wistful way Murray always spoke of their father was heavy on their minds as the years went by.

She should call Murray, she thought now, and see what Wendell had said to him. Maybe he had left some kind of a clue, and Murray had always been a man who was attentive to detail.

Then there was Marjorie, the producer. She was flashy, and there was always some kind of a party at her house. She had invited Kiri over once Kiri had turned seventeen, but her mother had answered with a resounding “no”.

“She’s a party girl, that one,” she had told her, “Where she goes, trouble tends to follow.”

And then, lastly, there was an interview with Birdie McClellan herself. When Paice had married her, the world had seen red, not necessarily out of love for her ex-wife Elizabeth (Tara’s mother) but for a visceral dislike of Birdie and everything she stood for.

Kiri noticed that Tara had not scratched Birdie off her own suspect list. Well, it figured.

***

There was a rat-tat-tat on the door just after midnight, and Kiri was half-asleep in her chair so it was Tara who went to open the door.

In walked Detective Faisa Khalid, Pinecrest’s primer detective by virtue of being its only detective. 

“Hey, how’s it going?” Tara inquired. 

Faisa removed her jacket, hung it on the door, and looked over at the passed-out Kiri. 

“I see you’ve put your sister to work since I saw you last. Kind of a harsh way to treat your family, huh?”

Tara rolled her eyes. 

“Who would know the topic better than the two of us? Except for you, of course. You’ve seen just about everything.”

“Thanks for the flattery. Now show me what you’ve got, because on our end we have a dead body in a decayed mall in a town that hasn’t seen a murder in years, and so needless to say they’d like to see the whole thing dealt with a little sooner rather than later.”

“He was writing a good about Paice.”

“Is there a reason you’ve started calling him Paice again? He was your father, right or wrong, and all of that.”

Tara shrugged.

“In the course of this investigation, he’s Paice. It’s better not to get too close to anybody involved.”

“I don’t want to be the one to tell you, but I’m pretty sure your father wasn’t the murderer, considering he’s been dead for more than twenty years.”

Tara cocked her head to the side as Kiri stirred in her recliner, then slowly sat up.

“Yeah, but I have a feeling he’s at the heart of this, somehow, and I don’t like the feeling I’m getting about it. At all.”

“What?” Kiri asked. “You think this is all about Dad? I mean, I get that the book is about him, but people have been writing books about him, for well, what thirty years? And no one else writing one has ended up dead before. Not even that guy who just made everything up…”

“Carver Crowley. How could I forget?” Tara replied. “He said that I was working for the CIA. They haven’t called me yet, but I can’t say I would necessarily turn down the offer. They always say ‘crime doesn’t pay’, but crime consulting just doesn’t pay what it used to, either.”

“I thought you got a percentage back on that art you recovered,” Faisa said.

“Yeah, a percentage, as in one percent,” Tara said. 

“Still, it was priceless art.”

“They put a price on it.”

“More importantly,” Faisa said, “I have the autopsy report, if you two would like to come look at it.”

Kiri rose from her seat and crowded in as Faisa opened the manila folder in front of her on the tiny table. Tara scooped up a page.

“It looks like he was drugged before he died? That seems like a lot of effort to go through when you don’t have any witnesses.”

“There has to be something else going on, I figure,” Faisa said, “I wonder if maybe the mall wasn’t the meeting place at all. Maybe they met somewhere else and the killer figured that that was the closest place where people might not look for a while. And, well, they were right.”

“Will they let us take a look at the mall?” Kiri inquired.

“Well, they won’t let you take a look. But they’ll let me take a look. And, well, you’re with me.”

***

Kiri was on her fifth cup of coffee as the three of them drove up to the Pinecrest Mall, once a teenage haven but now slated for demolition. There was something truly depressing about looking at a rundown mall – it was like the skeleton of something that had once been living, the very essence of a ghost town, just the frame of the building and a few wilting signs still up, advertising the flagship stores.

“What even happened to this place?” she asked.

“Rents got too high, I think,” Faisa said. “Pretty depressing. I had my first job here out of college. I was a salesgirl at Girls Just Wanna Have Guns. Some of my friends worked over at the pizza shop at the entrance. We would go over and visit each other at work, or meet up in the food court. That was years and years ago, though.” She pushed through a door despite the sign on it warning that Authorized Personnel Only would be permitted. “He was found here. Right by where the kids’ quarter-rides used to be. What a world, isn’t it? What a world.”

Kiri and Tara both looked around, trying to see if there were any clues in what appeared to be largely ripped-apart boards.

“How long has this thing been closed down?” Tara asked.

“Years. Must be… four or five at least. We kept hearing rumors that Kevin Smith was going to film Mallrats 2 here, but I guess the grass was a little greener elsewhere.” Faisa took a flashlight out of her pocket and began to flash it around. “The body was stashed right there,” she said, pointing the light in the direction of a thin board. “Like they tried to hide it, but not very much. Or maybe they even wanted us to find it. It’s hard to tell without knowing who did it.”

“Maybe this place holds some kind of meaning for them, too,” Kiri mused. “The same way it does for you.”

“Like the killer used to work here too?” Faisa inquired.

“Well, maybe not at Girls Just Wanna Have Guns,” Kiri replied, “Though if it had been a shooting…” She paused and looked back over at her. “How did he die, actually? I’m guessing he wasn’t shot, or there would have been a ballistics report?”

“Blunt force trauma,” Faisa stated, “They hit him over the head with something. But… honestly, looking at these boards, it could have been just about anything around here.”

“Did whoever checked this place over find anything?” Tara asked.

“By ‘whoever’, you mean me, because my colleagues have been out busting up parties and making sure people don’t beat each other up at the Homecoming game, and nothing so far. But if you want to take a second look, I’m not opposed. We’d probably need luminol to see for sure, and you know the sheriff of this tacky ass little town doesn’t have any. To be fair, being unprepared for murder is a little more acceptable when you have, usually, zero murders,” Faisa said.

“Then we might have to do this the old-fashioned way,” Tara mused. “Talk to everyone and see who seems shady.”

“That’s probably going to be almost everybody,” Kiri pointed out, “But here we go.”

***

Faisa sat in the apartment, drawing a series of three columns down the large piece of butcher paper in front of her.

“Here. We split everyone up... I'm going to delegate. However, if there’s some hint of danger – and I mean, if you so much as see a mouse that looks like it’s not sure if it wants to eat some cheese, you call me immediately. I’m trained for this. You two aren’t.”

Tara rolled her eyes.

“I was a journalist for ten years. I’ve been prepared for a long of things.”

“Don’t make me give you The Look,” Faisa warned her. “Now, I’m going to go see Dark Martin, because to be honest I’ve always been a big fan.” Dark was the other main writer in Blue Neighbor along with Paice, and the two had had a rocky relationship to say the least. They had insulted each other in the press on more than one occasion, and Dark had written an entire song that apparently said “Paice is the devil” if you listened to it backwards.

“I guess I’ll talk to Jake,” Kiri said. “He always seemed to like me when I was a kid.” Jake had been the bassist for Blue Neighbor.

“I know Reggie sure as hell didn’t do anything, but I guess I’ll take him,” Tara said. Reggie was Blue Neighbor’s drummer, known for being good-natured and humble. “But he lives up in New York. Since Jake’s local, Kiri, you should stop by Marjorie’s place in Philadelphia, too. And, well, I’ll give Murray a call. Maybe someone talked to him and mentioned something. He’s in tune to things like that. Then I guess we’ll start on everyone else.”

Kiri sighed, not expecting to find much of anything on either of the missions she had been sent on. Jake was quiet, as far as she could remember, and hadn’t been out in public much since Paice’s death. 

He was known for being sort of a hermit, with the exception of the occasional appearance with Dark and Reggie if some kind of charity function called for it. Kiri couldn’t shake the feeling that Tara was sending her off on the detective version of a puff piece, because she doubted that Wendell had gotten much out of Marjorie, either.

“And we’ll meet back here,” Faisa reiterated. “And if there’s any trouble at all…”

“We will call,” Kiri said with an exasperated sigh. “Yes, Mom. We will call.”

“Speaking of which,” Faisa said, “Since I doubt either of you can be objective, I’ll talk to your mother, Kiri, as well.”

“Good luck,” Tara said dryly, “If you can get anything out of her, you’re a better detective than I ever knew.”

“You’d be surprised,” Faisa said. “I was always popular with mothers back in high school. Maybe it never wore off.”

***

Tara went to the train station – which, in Pinecrest, consisted on a tiny shed with one lonely ticket-seller and a closed off bathroom – and purchased a ticket to New York.

She was the only one who boarded the train at that station, and she shuffled into a seat and plugged in her phone, deciding to educate herself on exactly what Reggie had been up to in the last twenty-some years. 

She could picture his face – good-natured with shining eyes and a sort of happy-go-lucky attitude – and she could remember the way he had always called her to say hello, even if briefly, long after her parents had split up and she’d become a footnote compared to the tiny dolls that had been May and Kiri.

Maybe she should have called first, but in her experience as a journalist, people were more forthcoming when you just dropped in on them. 

When she arrived at the station, she took the subway uptown and then walked out into the bitter cold to walk to Reggie’s apartment. She pressed the buzzer, cleared her throat, and introduced herself. In this weather, hopefully he was at least home.

“Tara? Well, come on up,” she heard him say. At least her luck seemed to be changing so far.

***

Faisa drove up to Birdie McClellan’s impressive three-story home and parked on the street, stepping out and making her way up the steps. She knocked on the door and clasped her hands together. Despite eight years on the police force, she could never shake the feeling that she was intruding, somehow, upon other people’s lives, and that she should just excuse herself and walk away.

That was her mother’s voice in her head again, clearly, and much less her own. Faisa had never been good at standing on ceremony.

A moment later, the door opened to reveal a tall, curvy woman with dark brown skin and short, curly hair. She recognized her from the news – Birdie McClellan was the woman who everyone loved to hate for a while. 

“Well, hello?” Birdie prompted. “What’s going on?”

“Detective Faisa Khalid,” Faisa said, showing her badge. “Sorry to bother you, Mrs. McClellan, but I was wondering if I could ask you a few short questions?”

“Is this about Wendell Hart?” Birdie inquired, “I just saw it online. What in the world happened to him?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Well, come in,” she said. “There’s not a lot I can tell you but – take a seat – I can tell you what we were talking about.”

Faisa took a spot off to the side of the leather couch in the middle of the living room. She looked around, seeing the mantles bedecked with photos in frames of Birdie, her daughters, and her late husband.

“Was he interviewing you about Paice?” Faisa inquired. Birdie nodded.

“He was writing a new book. ‘The Last Days of Paice McClellan’, he called it. And he came to talk to me at first, but I shut him down.”

“How come?”

“I found out who else he had been talking to.”

***

Kiri did call first, and “Uncle Jake” told her that he was quite happy to have her over for dinner. She wondered when, if at all, she should tell him that it wasn’t really a social call. Then again, maybe it was.  
After all, most of what she wanted to know could be chalked up to her own curiosity. 

That didn’t make her feel like she was hyperventilating any less, though, as the door to his apartment opened and she stepped inside.

“Kiri, how have you been?” Jake asked. He was known as being “the quiet” one in the band, and honestly Jake had always reminded Kiri a little bit of her sister May. He seemed to be the one to observe a situation before bursting in, which the other three – and Kiri – had been the ones who would act without thinking. Jake had gotten the rest of Blue Neighbor out of more than one scrape with the law over the years. 

“I’ve been good. I finished up that Master’s degree,” she told him. “But I came about, well… I had a couple of questions for something Tara’s working on.”

Jake pursed his lips together, but he gestured to the couch. 

“Please. Take a seat.”

The last time Kiri had been to see him, he had had no couch at all, only a long table and some throw pillows that people would sit on while gathering in a circle and, usually, eating tofu. She guessed that the couch had been added at the behest of his wife Carole, who he had married a few weeks ago. 

“Nice couch,” Kiri commented.

Jake looked sad.

“The trappings of modern life,” he explained. “We must sit, I suppose.”

Jake didn’t sit on the couch but sat across from the table, cross-legged, and looked across at her. 

“What would you like to know? Is this about the unfortunate death of Mr. Wendell Hart?”

“Yeah,” Kiri replied, “How did you know?”

“The internet has been quite abuzz with his demise. I have to say it was a shock to hear, especially considering how it happened. Mr. Hart spoke with me perhaps a week before he died. The police haven’t come to ask any questions about it, however, so they must not think it in any way connected.”

“Well, I doubt that they would think you’re connected to it. You’re, well, spiritual,” Kiri replied. Jake chuckled.

“Well, I know that I didn’t kill him, Kiri. But I would like to think there may be some things that I could do to help. But they haven’t asked. Is there anything that Tara has found out so far?” Kiri didn't ask how he knew that Tara was involved in this somehow.

“Well, she’s working with a local detective to see what we can find out.”

“How has Tara been? She was always so serious. I haven’t heard from her in years. I know I heard she was engaged at some point.”

“Didn’t work out,” Kiri replied. Kiri didn’t know very much about Tara’s ex-fiancé, or really more much about Tara’s life than Jake did. “Tara tends to keep to herself. You know how she can be.”

“What about May?”

“Well,” I said, “You first. What did Wendell Hart come to ask you about?”

“Well, about Paice – your dad, of course – for his book. He wanted to know some stuff about our past together.”

“About your past? What part of your past?” Kiri asked. 

“Well, about some party we were all at years and years ago. I barely even remember it. I’m not sure why he wanted to know about it.”

“Party? Party where at?”

“Something at Marjorie’s. Our old producer, you know? But I don’t really remember anything weird happening at that party, so I don’t know what he could have wanted to write about. But then again… it was kind of a different world back then.”

***

“Tara, Tara, hello,” Reggie said, flashing a smile. “Are you writing another article? I’ve always been keeping up on everything you’ve written, but I haven’t seen anything recently.”

“Well, I haven’t really been writing, so much, as… well, I’ve been looking into something,” Tara said.

“Tell me more,” Reggie said. “Would you like anything to drink? I have plenty from both the alcoholic and non-alcoholic avenues of, well, drink.”

Tara laughed.

“Why is it that you always know how to make me smile, Reggie? I feel like I was always so sad as a kid, except when you came by. It’s a gift, honestly. And yeah, I guess I’ll take an iced tea, if it’s not too much trouble.”

Reggie departed to the back and returned with two glasses of iced tea.

“As promised. Do you still like the raspberry kind?”

“How do you even remember that?”

“Well, your dad used to always remind me.”

Tara sighed at that.

“I’m surprised that he remembered anything about me to tell anybody.”

Reggie tilted his head to the side slightly and looked at her.

“For all of your angst about your father, Tara, most of the time when you speak, I can’t help but hear his voice.”

“I don’t know that I would consider that a compliment,” Tara replied dryly. “If I’m destined to cut, run, and then die, then I don’t know that I’ve lived my life the right way.”

Reggie smiled.

“Better than living afraid, wouldn’t you say?” he replied.

“Afraid of what?” Tara asked.

Reggie shrugged.

“Afraid of taking chances. Haven’t you heard all of that ‘lives of quiet desperation’ stuff?”

“My dad never lived a life of quiet desperation, Reggie. My dad lived a life of…” Tara hesitated, realizing she didn’t actually know how she wanted to end that sentence. Paice McClellan had been shot dead when Tara was fifteen, at an age where she felt as if she should have begun to understand her father. She didn’t have the excuse that May and Kiri did of being too young to really know any better. “He lived a life of going after what he wanted to go after, and damn anyone else. When he wanted to be with my mom, that was what he did, and then when Birdie crossed his path, he had to be with her. And damn it if he didn’t end up with either one in the end.”

“That part wasn’t exactly his fault, Tara. No one really thinks that some whacko from Florida is going to burst into your life and take it. Until you see it happen, that is. You’ve been living with that specter over your entire life.”

***

“Who else he had been talking to,” Faisa quickly learned, was the one person for whom Birdie had absolutely no tolerance. 

Birdie considered herself, as she told Faisa, to be a peace-loving person, someone who attended anti-war rallies and had been involved in trying to levitate the Pentagon at one point, without any success.

Faisa’s parents, who had a portrait of Reagan in their living room, had never been huge fans, but behind some of the tsk-ing as Birdie and Paice engaged in this weird event and that, she seemed to detect a little bit of veiled admiration. After all, Birdie McClellan was one of the most controversial people in the world, which according to Faisa’s mom “takes a lot of effort”. 

Birdie’s peaceful sensitivities, however, only extended so far. There was one man alive who, it seemed, would not be saved from a burning building by Birdie and perhaps would have been shoved back through the collapsing window if he were in such a building.

“He contacted Forbesly?” Faisa inquired. She had been nine when Drew Allen Forbesly, native of Florida, had traveled to Chicago and killed Paice McClellan in front of the hotel he had been staying at, and she had been nineteen when Forbesly had been temporarily released in an ill-fated parole attempt. He’d gotten into trouble fairly quickly with a well-publicized run-in at the… “The Pinecrest Mall,” Faisa finished. “Isn’t that where he got arrested when he went back to jail? Was there something going on with him? Is that why they met there?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Birdie replied. “He let it slip that he’d been meeting with that man and I told him I wouldn’t speak with him anymore. It does seem quite an odd choice of venue, but maybe that’s only how he knows about it in the first place.”

“Or what if,” Faisa paused and caught herself before nearly saying the man’s name, “that man is involved in this somehow? Could he have people on the outside doing his dirty work for him?”

“I mean, it’s not that I would put it past him,” Birdie replied. “But it doesn’t really seem like his style. You remember how it was – when he shot my husband, he wanted everybody to know. And Wendell was about to give him all the attention he could dream of, all over again. He’d never want Wendell to die.”

***

Kiri found, as she was saying her goodbyes to Jake, that she didn’t really want to leave. His house had a weird kind of inviting vibe to it that she hadn’t felt in a very long time.

“I’ll be back, soon,” she promised. “It won’t take me nearly as long to stop by, the next time.”

“That is, if you aren’t too busy helping Tara catch killers next time,” Jake said with a smile. “Just don’t get pulled into it too much, and don’t be so obsessed with being her assistant that you forget to be her sister, first.”

That echoed in Kiri’s mind as she left Jake’s house and started off for Marjorie’s place. She told herself that she should call first, all over again, but then again, Marjorie seemed like the kind of person who always had her door open.

She had been a glamorous sort of woman, the kind of woman that Kiri had always wanted to look like when she was growing up. She’d always looked as if she had stepped off of a modeling page, and was rarely seen without a pair of designer sunglasses and a big, satisfied smile on her face.

Marjorie lived off the beaten track, at least as off the beaten track as a mansion in the middle of Northeast Philadelphia could really be. Her place was directly behind a police station, and still further behind there was an expansive park into which her parties were known to spill out. Kiri noticed no one was in the park and counted herself lucky that she seemed to have caught Marjorie on a night without a party. She didn’t want to report back to Tara that she had gotten absolutely nothing because she’d tried to yell all the questions over screaming drunk partygoers.

Kiri let herself in through the spectacular front gate – metal, it seemed when she touched it, but with some sort of gold spray covering it all over – and then walked down a path that led up to the front door, a glass monstrosity that showed that she was wrong – there were a few people clearly visible within the living room drinking and laughing.

Kiri sighed. Well, any time was a good time to let yourself into a party uninvited, she guessed. 

***

When Tara found herself waiting at Penn Station, she stepped off as far from the throng of passengers as she could and selected Murray Finch’s name from her list of contacts before hitting “call”.

“Hey,” a sleepy voice answered. “Is this Tara?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Sorry about the time difference, Murray. How are things in Spain?”

“It’s not Spain. It’s Euskara. They take that very seriously around here. And it’s very good. You sound a little bit panicked. What’s going on? Is everyone okay?”

“If by ‘everyone’ you include Wendell Hart, then no. He was found murdered a few days ago.”

“…Good God. I just talked to him two weeks ago.”

“That’s what everyone keeps saying. Would it be okay if I ask you what you two were talking about?”

“Of course, Tara. I’d love to. He was asking about my relationship with your dad, first. Whether we were together – you know, the old kind of stuff. But then… well, he started asking about some party that your father was at a long time ago.”

“What kind of party?” Tara asked.

“It was at Marjorie’s place. I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t really tell him all that much. It was during that month that I was in rehab.”

“You were in rehab?”

“Yeah, for sleeping pills. It was back when you were… three or four. You wouldn’t have remembered it, most likely, and we didn’t really ever talk about it either.”

“Did my dad ever tell you anything about that party?” Tara asked. 

“No, but I remember that some things used to go… wrong, at Marjorie’s parties. Your father liked working with her on the albums, but I think… well, things were always a little weird with her. But he never said anything about this party – if something happened, he decided that he wasn’t going to tell me about it.”

“And that’s what you told Wendell Hart, too?”

“That’s what I told him. But if there was some kind of real story he was after, he didn’t tell me what it was. But now I wonder if something happened, and that’s what he was really writing about. Maybe the book about your dad was just a smokescreen.”

***

Faisa knocked on the front door of Dark Martin’s two-story house. There was a tree in the front yard, changing colors for the fall.

It felt odd to knock on the door of some universally known person, like knocking on George Washington’s door. She tried to catch her breath.

Through the small window at the top of the door, Faisa saw a face appear. He looked a lot different than he had on TV, but she recognized him still without any trouble – that was, indeed, Dark Martin, the man who for years girls had lined up to try and marry. 

Faisa couldn’t help but feel a tiny chill herself, as he was rather cute. But sad, still – there was a sadness that hadn’t been there in those early years. A sadness that must have set in around 1994, when the world went completely up in flames for them.

“Hello,” Faisa said. “I’m so sorry to bother you, but my name is Detective Khalid and I’m just wondering if I would be able to ask you a few questions about a conversation you had with Wendell Hart.”

Dark hesitated, then seemed to look around, before nodding slowly.

“Come in.”

When she stepped inside, she saw that all the lights were turned off. She hesitated at the light switch and then decided against pushing light into the room and jolting them both. 

“Sorry,” Dark said, flicking a lamp on near him. “I was just resting when you knocked.”

“That’s fine. Sorry for running in unannounced,” Faisa replied. “Did you get a phone call from Wendell Hart? Or did he stop by recently? He said in this book that he spoke with you, but he was kind of unclear as to what he was actually meeting with you about.”

“Just another book about Paice. That’s what I thought, at least. I swear, everywhere I turn, someone wants a quote for another book about Paice, like I want to keep thinking about the moment my best friend was killed over and over again so they can get the most raw quote to put on the front page, or something.”

“Well, I don’t want to bring anything like that up for you,” Faisa replied. “I just want to know… Birdie said that she hadn’t spoken with Wendell in a while. When was the last time that you heard from him?”

“Last week, actually,” Dark replied. “It was a pretty brief phone call, though. He said he wanted to meet up to ask about some party from back in the day – some time in the 80’s, I think. Something that happened at Marjorie’s.”

“Marjorie the producer?”

“Yeah, one and the same. I have to say, I didn’t really trust her after around ’82, but I was at the party he mentioned. I think.”

“Do you remember anything important happening at that party? Any reason why someone would be asking about it forty some years later?”

“Well, Marjorie has a reputation for being a little bit wild. Honestly, anything could have happened at one of her parties. I had just started dating Shawnee, my wife, so we spent most of it just sitting in the living room and talking. I think Paice and Birdie were dating around that time, too, but they might have been engaged. I don’t really remember talking to them at that. It was all right after we wrapped the last album, so we tended to argue a lot around then.”

“Well, think back. If something happened at that party, then it might have something to do with what got Wendell killed.” Faisa paused. “And… oh gosh… Kiri’s over at Marjorie’s interviewing her.”

Dark looked back at her.

“Kiri?” he asked, concern starting up in his eyes. “I mean, I never knew Marjorie to hurt anyone, but the last I heard of her, she was pretty paranoid and acting really strange, especially after Paice died.”

“I should get to Marjorie’s,” Faisa said. “But… thank you. Thank you.”

She turned and walked out the door as quickly as she could, ran to the car and started off in the direction of Marjorie Kemp’s home, a sense of foreboding surrounding her as if walls were quickly closing in. 

***

“Come in, come in…” one of Marjorie’s guests, a tall, blonde woman, said when she noticed Kiri standing at the door. “Don’t just stand out there looking in. I need you to come in and play.”

“I was looking for Marjorie Kemp,” Kiri stated, trying to keep her tone as even as she could.

“She’s right inside.” The woman had an airy kind of voice, as if she was somewhere else, not quite connected to everyone and everything else. Kiri looked around a moment, before she stepped onto the threshold. 

The door shut behind her, and she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she had just stepped from one world into quite another.

***

The Amtrak high-speed train seemed as if it was moving far too slowly for Tara’s taste. Murray’s words rang in her mind – that Wendell’s book was looking for something else entirely. Something he may have found. Something that may have gotten him killed. 

And that something was exactly where Kiri had said she was going to go. Tara hit Kiri’s name on her phone again and again, but it continued to ring and then go to voicemail. Was Kiri just ignoring her calls – or maybe she hadn’t heard them – or maybe something had gone horribly wrong?

After the fourth attempt, she sighed and called Faisa instead.

“I’m on my way over there right now,” Faisa said as soon as she answered. “There’s something going on, and I feel like Marjorie Kemp is at the epicenter of it all.”

“Have you been able to get in touch with Kiri?” Tara continued, “I’ve been calling her but she hasn’t picked up. I don’t know if maybe she’s just mad at me, but…” And if she was, and if it got Kiri hurt or worse, it would all fall on Tara. Tara was the one who had pushed Kiri away – and May too, May didn’t even talk to her anymore – because she had been so resentful of the way they had had her father’s love and attention when she hadn’t. Even though they had only had it for five years.

“Maybe she’s in the middle of finding something out. Or maybe she just lost service,” Faisa replied. “Either way, I – USE YOUR TURN SIGNAL! It’s there for a reason! – Sorry. Listen, I’m about a half hour away. How close are you?”

“About… the same, probably. I think we’re almost into South Jersey by now,” Tara said. “Then if I hop on the el… Well, I can be there. But you’ll probably beat me there. Just let me know as soon as you find Kiri, so I know she’s okay. I kind of need her to be okay, Faisa.”

“I’m not going to let you down.”

Tara knew that Faisa couldn’t promise that, not really, but her voice was comforting nonetheless. If she found Kiri, if she got her out of this – after she had been the one to bring her into it in the first place – then she would never let her go.

As the train continued to speed down the track, stuck in time it seemed, Tara scrolled down her contacts and selected “May”.

The phone rang a few times as she put it to her ear.

“Hello?” a voice said on the other end.

“Hi, May? It’s, uh, it’s Tara.”

“Oh, hey. Tara. You didn’t come up. Did you get a new number?”

“I did. I… Well, listen May, I think I need to get off here in a moment because, uh, well it’s the Quiet Car, but I just really wanted to let you know that I love you. And as soon as I get out of here… I’m going to come see you.”

“Out of here? Are you in jail or something?”

“No, not exactly. Just… uh, well, be on the lookout for a call from me. Love you.”

“Love you too, Tara,” May replied in a voice that sounded utterly confused.

When Tara hung up the phone, she couldn’t stop herself from sobbing into her hands. No one on the train said anything.

She couldn’t blame them – she probably wouldn’t have said anything, either.

***

“Marjorie is right this way,” the blonde woman told Kiri.

“And what’s your name?” Kiri pressed, keeping her hands close to her as if trying to keep from being sucked into some sort of vortex, yet failing. 

“Oh, that’s not important. I’m just a friend of Marjorie’s,” the woman said with a chuckle. “That’s who we all are, here.”  
Kiri looked around. There were people in what seemed to be every corner of the room, all dressed in long and flowy coats of different colors – some even looked more like robes. She began to wonder exactly what she had just walked into.

She felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. Tara, probably, she thought to herself.

“Excuse me,” she began, reaching into her pocket, but the woman grabbed her by the wrist.

“Marjorie is waiting, my dear. It’s quite impolite to answer a call when you are in the midst of the social event of the season. You wouldn’t want Marjorie to get the wrong idea.”

“I just… Think it might be my sister calling,” Kiri said. “She’s been, uh, unwell.” She found herself stammering and nervous, almost chilly, and not sure what she was making of it. Tara being “unwell” wasn’t the biggest lie she had ever told, to be honest – maybe Tara had been a little bit “off” for a long time. Maybe the pressure of being Paice McClellan’s oldest and forgotten daughter did that to somebody.

After all, being Kiri McClellan had done something to her just the same. 

“Is your sister the boss of you?” the woman asked for a laugh. “Forgive me, but it looks like you’re an adult, aren’t you? How old are you?”

“Thirty-one,” Kiri managed, although she was starting to feel like this whole thing was some kind of a set-up. A set-up for what, though?

But on the other hand, the woman’s words were oddly resonating with Kiri. She had never really had a chance to feel like an adult – if it wasn’t her mother moving her into some direction or another, it was  
Tara and May trying to figure out her life for her, as if she was somehow incapable.

“Okay,” Kiri managed, “I’ll go.” She put her hand back on the phone and squeezed it, hoping she was making the right decision.

She allowed herself to be led up a winding staircase; at top of the staircase was a long, blue hallway with many doors on either side. The doors all seemed to be painted different colors, but all of them were oddly bright. 

She should be recording this, somehow, she considered, and she should be reporting this all back to Tara. Some assistant she had turned out to be. 

“Marjorie is at the end of the hall,” the woman told her, “She’s been waiting for you, you know.”

Kiri stepped forward. There was music playing, somewhere in the house, a catchy tune.

She was bouncing to it, rocking to it, when she realized a moment later that it sounded like one of her father’s old songs. That made sense, of course, with Marjorie being his producer. It was one of the ones that he used to sing to her and May when they curled up in their beds when they had been little.

Something about:  
_“My baby, my love,  
You’re all I need,  
My sugar, my sweet  
Don’t ever set me free…”_

She started to hum it under her breath as she walked forward, not sure of what she would find at the end of the hallway. Her head felt airy, as if she was filled up with helium.  
Her hand clasped the doorknob. And then she opened it.

***

Faisa hated parallel parking – that was the first thing that went through her head as she hastily turned the wheel to get into the spot in front of Marjorie Kemp’s place. There were way too many cars parked out here for her comfort.

She flung open the door after she finally got parked, running up the steps and then banging on Marjorie’s front door. She wasn’t sure quite what her plan was if nobody came to the door – other than maybe breaking it down and dealing with what her superiors had to say about it later. After all, she had no jurisdiction here. 

But that didn’t matter. She had been the one who had sent Kiri to this place, and if anything happened, it would be blood on her hands.

She rang the doorbell again, over and over in a frenzy. 

Finally, after what felt like hours, the door slowly opened, and a woman with long black hair poked her head out and looked over at Faisa, curling her lips.

“What do you want?” she inquired.

“Faisa Khalid. Pinecrest Police. I’m looking for someone. You think you can let me in there so I can get her and come back home?”

“Uh, listen. I don’t know who you are, and honestly I don’t really care.” The woman leaned back and blew out a puff of air. “But if you ain’t on Marjorie’s list, well then I am so, so sorry girl because I cannot do anything to help you with that.” She began to close the door, and Faisa stuck her foot out, forcing it open.

“I’m going to need to get added to Marjorie’s list real quick, or else there’s going to be a serious problem, okay? My friend is in there, and I’m going to need to see that she’s okay. And that’s going to need to happen right away, or you’re not going to like what happens.” Faisa was neither exactly sure when Kiri and Tara had begun to be counted as her friends, nor exactly what she would be able to make happen that the strange woman wouldn’t like, but she managed to say it all in a convincing enough voice that the woman stepped back, despite having a glare that would have made Faisa burst into flames, if looks could kill.

Faisa stepped inside, looking around. There were strobe lights hung from the ceiling in the living room, flashing everywhere and lulling her into a kind of content discontent, as if the world around her was beginning to grow foggy and indistinct.

“Where is she?” Faisa asked.

“Who?” the woman inquired.

“The girl who just got here. Blonde hair, brown eyes. Kiri McClellan. You’d have to know who she is.” 

Everyone knew who the McClellans were. Maybe that had always been part of the problem. They had always been under some kind of weird microscope, and now Kiri was out loose in this weird world that was even starting to throw Faisa a little = it was hard to get her bearings in here as she moved to the staircase and grasped the railing.

“Can I get you a drink?” the woman asked.

“I don’t drink,” Faisa replied dryly. “Will I find Kiri McClellan upstairs? You need to tell me now.”  
The sooner she went and got Kiri, the sooner she could go and clear her head, something that she desperately needed to do.

Each step seemed to take hours to mount, and they seemed to be fading into the ground. Faisa wondered if there wasn’t some kind of drug in the room – something airborne maybe, or something she had grazed her fingers against as she had entered the house. If that was so, then Kiri would have come into contact with it too. Faisa kicked herself all over again for letting her go alone.

“Kiri?” Faisa began to call, walking down the hall and seeing that all of the doors were just part of the way open, letting out odd streams of blue and red light. It sounded like music was playing, but Faisa couldn’t quite put her finger on it. It actually sounded like something from her childhood, a song in Arabic that her parents had always used to play. 

Something about, in the winter I will wait for you. She remembered that much of how it used to go. Or maybe, I waited for you in the winter.

“Kiri?” she called again. 

It sounded like someone was playing the harp down the hall, and Faisa continued stepping forward, towards the sound, until she made it to the last door, the only one directly facing her.

“Kiri? Are you in there?” she called. She was ready to get out of this place as soon as she could; it was giving her the creeps.

And yet it was hard to pull herself away. There had to be something else going on there.

The door swung open and a woman in her sixties stepped out. She had a short, brown bob on her head, with highlights, and she wore a long, silver dress.

“So, you’ve come to my party, my lovely.”

***

Tara had been trying to get in touch with both Faisa and Kiri the entire time that she had been riding the el back towards where Marjorie lived. She had even tried calling Marjorie herself, hoping that there was some innocent explanation for the radio silence, but she had come up empty. Every single call kept going to voicemail.

She found each person who hovered near her supremely irritating, wishing that the train would skip every stop so she could burst into that house and see her little sister again. To save her, to tell her that she really did mean something to her and that she always had.

That she was more than just an assistant, but that she always wanted to have her as one, too. That it hadn’t been a fluke when she had asked her to come along.

When the doors opened at the stop, Tara flew off and over the staircase, headed for Marjorie’s. 

The gate was no match for her – she didn’t bother to push it open but merely scaled it and climbed over.

She had always been good at climbing trees when she had been a kid; that had been something that she had never told Kiri about. Her childhood was a locked box that her sisters had never gotten the chance to see, because Tara had kept it shut.

Tara banged on the door with her fist so hard that the storm door rattled. 

“Let me in!” she yelled. “You need to let me in right the hell now!”

The door opened, slowly, tortuously slowly, and a tall, skinny red-haired woman with vapid eyes stared right back at Tara.

“You’re on Marjorie’s list,” the woman declared.

“Good. You bring me to her right this second.”

***

Tara was led into the back room, and she found that the room was completely dark.

But she could see the outline of Marjorie’s face in the darkness, and the rest of her body too. She could remember the day she had met her, back when she had been a kid, a tag-a-long to her famous father. 

She lurched forward and pinned Marjorie up against the wall. 

“The jig’s up. Where’s Kiri and Faisa?”

“They’re dealt with,” Marjorie replied. “They’ll stay here with the rest of them. And you shouldn’t interfere.”

“Shouldn’t interfere with what?” Tara yelled. “Why are you doing all of this?” And then, hoping she had hit upon at least some part of the answer, “Why did you kill Wendell Hart?”

“Because of the girl, Tara,” Marjorie replied. “You should know… You were there, after all.”

“What?”

“The dark will help you to remember,” Marjorie replied, and then there was the sound of a door closing.

***

_“It’ll be five minutes,” Paice McClellan declared as he shut the car door. “I’ll have you back quick as a flash. I just need to stick my head there and see what Marjorie wants. You stay here, Tara, okay? Scout’s honor?”_

_Eight-year-old Tara flashed a big thumbs up, even if she didn’t know quite what Scout’s honor meant. And she really did intend to wait right there, up until she began to wonder again about where her dad went all the times that he wasn’t there with her. It seemed as if she saw him so rarely, and now here it was her weekend with him and he was going in to talk with somebody about his stupid album. It just wasn’t fair._

_Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she just spied on him a little bit._

_She hopped out of the door and tried to follow where she had seen her father go._

_At the top of the stairs was a room at the very back, and light was streaming out of it._

_That was when she heard the scream, and then the crack. As if something was vibrating beneath her._

_She crept closer, wrapping her arms around herself, until she made it to the door._

_Something was caught on the door. A wisp of blonde hair._

_Tara turned and ran as far as she could._

***

She shook her head. That memory couldn’t be real, because she hadn’t remembered ever thinking about it before.

“Tara?” she heard Kiri call her name, and she stumbled in the darkness to wrap her arms around her sister.

“Kiri! Kiri, it’s me… I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“Kiri! Tara!” That was Faisa’s voice now, too. They were all in this same, dark room – but for what reason?

“I’m the one,” Tara whispered, her voice low and shaking. “I’m the one they were really looking for… I was the one who knew what happened that night at the party.”

“What are you talking about?” Faisa asked. “That party that Wendell Hart was trying to find out about?”

“Yeah. I was there. I stepped out of the car. My dad was somewhere else and I think… so was everyone else connected to him. But I saw. Marjorie… she killed a girl. Or a girl died. Either way. I think that’s why she killed Wendell Hart. And now we’re next, because we know about it. And me most of all because… I saw it. I saw it!”

“All right, well,” Faisa replied. “Let’s get the hell out of here right now!” She put her hand out and gripped both Tara and Kiri’s hands. “I’m going to ram the door, so get on either side of it.”

“I don’t even know which direction to go in,” Kiri spoke up, “And my head still feels like it’s falling over.”

“I can see a little bit of light in this direction,” Faisa replied. She pushed them off to one side and then burst forward, and the two of them heard the door rattling.

“Faisa, be careful,” Kiri pleaded. 

The detective rammed the door again.

“Open!” she seemed to command. “Ugh.”

The third time she ran against the door, it burst open with a “crack” sound. Light streamed in from the hallway, still alit in strobe lights.

“Wait!” Kiri asked, as they followed Faisa down the steps and out through the, at last open again, storm door. “What are we going to tell everyone?”

Faisa turned back, pointing Tara and Kiri towards the house – now there was no one in the doorway at all. It was only Marjorie, her face twisted in anger. 

“I don’t know what. Maybe nothing at all.”

Kiri paced, sure that Marjorie was going to come up behind her any second and drag her back into whatever bizarre abyss she had created in there. 

“It’s like I can’t shake my head and get the fuzz out of it,” she said, “Like there’s tendrils that still want to bring me back there.”

“She’s got her hands on whatever people want,” Faisa mused. “We all saw or heard things from our childhood… But the one she wanted was Tara.”

Tara was quietly rocking back in the chair as May, beleaguered owner of their new safe house, continued to bring her water and rags for her head.

“All right,” May said, marching over to Faisa and Kiri. “I want to hear all of it. What the hell did Marjorie Kemp do to her?”

Faisa didn’t have an explanation, and neither did Kiri. 

“I don’t know. She has some kind of weird drug cult going on over there. Can’t you arrest her or something, Faisa?” Kiri asked. “That’s what you do, after all.”

“That’s the thing. I called them in and they found… well, nothing. Marjorie had completely cleared out. Kind of taunting fate to live behind a police station, wasn’t she?” Faisa paused and sighed. “And there’s no word on who that girl could have been. Somebody who ran away, I guess. Who wanted the rock star life. I guess Wendell must have thought that Paice saw something that night, but if he did, he never told anybody. The secret died with him.”

“Until Wendell stirred it back up, and then when she saw me… I guess it hit that Tara knew something,” Kiri said, dragging a hand over her face. “This is something else. Are we supposed to live the rest of our lives afraid that this woman is going to come get us?”

“No.” They all turned to Tara, who had risen from her seat. “She’s going to live in fear that I’m going to get her. She’s going to mess up somewhere along the line sooner or later, and we’re going to get her.” She smiled and extended her hand. “Kiri… Let’s get to work.”


End file.
